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Great Lakes Writers Festival bringing accomplished writers to campus

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Published: October 13, 2015

Authors A. E. Stallings and Nickolas ButlerLakeland College will welcome a popular Wisconsin writer and an accomplished poet to its annual celebration of writing and reading, the Great Lakes Writers Festival, set this year for Nov. 5-6 on Lakeland's main campus.

Nickolas Butler and A. E. Stallings will join the Lakeland community for conversations about their craft and to read from their work. The event, hosted by Lakeland Fessler Professor of Creative Writing Karl Elder, provides seasoned and emerging writers the opportunity to learn from professional writers and share and discuss their work with peers.

Community members are invited to participate in all events, but are especially encouraged to attend readings and workshops. All events are free and open to the public.

Butler was born in Allentown, Pa., raised in Eau Claire, Wis., and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel, "Shotgun Lovesongs," and a collection of short stories entitled, "Beneath the Bonfire."

He is the winner of France's prestigious PAGE Prix America, the 2014 Great Lakes Great Reads Award and the 2014 Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and was long-listed for the 2014 Flaherty Dunnan Award for First Novel and short-listed for France's FNAC Prix.

Along the way, he has worked as a Burger King maintenance man, a tutor, a telemarketer, a hot dog vendor, an innkeeper (twice), an office manager, a coffee roaster, a liquor store clerk and an author escort. His itinerant work includes: potato harvester, grape picker and Christmas tree axe-man. His short stories, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in: Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, The Lumberyard, The Christian Science Monitor, Narrative, Sixth Finch and several other publications.

He lives on 16 acres of land in rural Wisconsin adjacent to a buffalo farm. He is married and has two children.

Among the finest New Formalist poets in the world, Stallings studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published three collections of poetry: "Archaic Smile," "Hapax" and "Olives," and a verse translation (in rhyming fourteeners) of "Lucretius, The Nature of Things."

She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a regular faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Sewanee Summer Writers' Conference.

Having studied in Athens, Ga., she now lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband and their two children.